Grid seen from above, IR issues

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Grid seen from above, IR issues

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Nov 04, 2014 9:05 pm

I shared this on G_ where it got some comment. This is a test of a webcam looking into the top of my main tank, with the fusor grid horizontal in a 6x6" sidearm. Nothing special going on here - about 2m neutrons/second fusion rate. You can see the beam lose focus coming out of the end of the grid and start picking up electrons and making light. That's not the issue at the moment - that beam goes across the tank and helps make more ions too...not a total waste. But the graphite on the closed end is actually orange hot - but looks purple too in this picture due to not enough IR stop in the camera....we run really near the meltiing point of the Cu feed through so it's important to see that accurately...when running remotely as we hope to be doing soon.
TopShot.jpg
Remember, light is loss...but purty anyway.


The thing that looks like an inverted U near the grid end is actually a blotch on the viewport...on the inside. I''ll have to break vacuum to fix that.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Grid seen from above, IR issues

Postby Lars Berntzon » Thu Nov 27, 2014 11:02 am

I was thinking Doug, what about making the grid like a tube. With two cathode rings at the openings of the tube, accelerating the D2 nucleus towards the tube, and then having a positive charge on the tube focusing the beams once inside the tube. Also around the tube, cooling water to extract heat energy. And.. in the middle of the tube, place the outlet to the vacuum pump to remove the helium and sputtered stuff. ... just thinking.
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Re: Grid seen from above, IR issues

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Nov 27, 2014 2:37 pm

We've tried mutl-concentric grids here, mostly since before this board existed. For various reasons, not all understood, none of them worked out well at all.

Yes, while we have ions, we also have a net-negative charge in there. Anything that tries to go more than a couple hundred volts above ground - even a foot from the action - sees a huge load to ground from all the free electrons hitting it.

No matter how we biased the outer grid/inner grid, we got more power draw, less fusion, less Q. We obviously didn't try everything - power supply limits and so on, but we tried a lot of things.

It appears more like we have a rather strange mix of ions with closely following electrons, kind of a polarized plasma (with extra electrons, which kind of makes some sense since we have this large negative supply pumping them in, secondary emission etc).

It could be that these unbound but close by electrons even get closer than they do when bound (look at the wavefunctions for bound ones, they have little probability near the nucleus), and do so often - they may be helping, in fact, by neutralizing some of the Coloumb repulstion until just the right moment.

Recent experiments with RF show that in some special cases we seem to be able to "mumbledepeg*" the ions into one another, perhaps using this effect, all I know is we got reproducible far higher output and Q in a couple of experiments doing that. Since then, I've not been running in that mode, since my shielding is inadequate to maintain my health at those levels of output, so that's why the sudden bunch of reports here on how I'm setting up remote control, I plan to do this from another building further away.

We are not even sure at this point that most of the fusion is at the focus. We do know that at least some of it is at the tank walls, where there is always some D embedded unti lthey get hot - you can measure it by locality of fusion with a hornyak or bubble detector (we have) and by noting a reduction in total output as vs wall temperature, which drives out the D, so there's no target. I plan to build a new pinhole camera with a magnet in it to reject light charged particles (eg electrons) to look at an image of fast protons from fusion and see where it's really happening, inspired by an energy analyzer first developed at the University of Wisconson. Theirs didn't make an image, though they got a very rough idea using a moveable obscuring plate of something. Mine will make an image, probably multiple ones for various E/M ratios, X rays, and velocities. We'll just have to see what that looks like. I suspect a fair amount of fusion, at this point, is beam on beam, but not all at the focus. Things are going both directions in those fan beams coming out of the grid.

* An old game of knife throwing where you try to hit point first from a distance, by spinning it end over end. Bored old drunk guys would do this so the knife hit between their spread fingers on the table, when a mistake is well, not advisable and rather messy.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Grid seen from above, IR issues

Postby Lars Berntzon » Tue Dec 23, 2014 6:38 am

Thanks Doug, I guessed my idea was a bit naive, but I wanted to share anyway. I didn't understand that you had all those electrons in there as well, but of course they would be, if not coming with the plasma, they'd be coming from the walls or so I guess.
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Re: Grid seen from above, IR issues

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Dec 23, 2014 8:11 pm

Lars, it's interesting. There is no lack of proposals from PhD types to do just that kind of multigrid approach (I've seen up to 5 proposed). The thing is, they never build them, or of they do and they fail, they don't write papers about it - there is a huge "selection bias" in the literature. That's one reason I discourage too much BS'ing here (outside the water cooler, where anything goes), we'd rather see projects that either work or don't work - and the reasons why if possible, so others can learn what works and what doesn't. Doers, not just talkers. Education doesn't seem like it's enough if you can't make it work! II's not your bad, in other words. Until you have some hands-on time, it looks a lot simpler than it turns out to be, is all.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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